Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. Managing it effectively is crucial in any industry, but particularly so in the construction sector, where profit margins are often razor-thin and projects are often prone to disruption and delays.
IFS Cloud solutions, delivered by Muzulu, empower businesses in the construction industry to deliver more projects on time, on budget and to an excellent standard. It gives companies operating in the sector real-time visibility, and greater control, over their finances and their other assets.
In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the ways in which construction businesses can use IFS Cloud to enhance their operations, ensuring efficient management of their cash flow and streamlining their existing financial processes. Here are some top tips to consider.
Real-time visibility
Save time and reduce accounting errors
Forecast future cash flow
Integrate IFS with payment systems
Control expenses and manage inventory
Negotiate better payment terms
Real-time visibility
IFS Cloud solutions, delivered by Muzulu, give construction companies unparalleled visibility over their finances. IFS offers a range of real-time reporting features to help businesses monitor their cash flow continuously, allowing them to identify potential issues sooner.
This, in turn, enables these businesses to take the necessary measures to address these issues before they become bigger problems. It can also help you to minimise idle cash, by investing any surplus funds in short-term investments or moving it into interest-bearing savings accounts.
Save time and reduce accounting errors
When you’re trying to run a busy construction business, the last thing you need is to be tied down with administrative tasks. IFS Cloud can lighten the load by automating processes including invoicing, reconciliation and payment processing, saving time and reducing the risk of mistakes.
Accounting errors can cause real problems for businesses, in the construction sector as elsewhere. Where an accounting error goes undetected, it can have a number of knock-on effects – potentially affecting your ability to pay subcontractors, suppliers and employees on time and in the right amount.
Forecast future cash flow
With IFS Cloud, construction companies can leverage historical data to forecast your future cash flow, allowing you to plan for the coming months with greater certainty. This can be very valuable when it comes to managing your finances, as it can help you to anticipate cash shortages (or surpluses) and make better informed financial decisions based on this information.
IFS Cloud can create cash flow projections based on a wide range of scenarios and assumptions. This allows businesses to simulate different business conditions, identify potential cash flow risks and therefore develop plans to mitigate them.
Integrate IFS with payment systems
IFS Cloud can be integrated with payment and banking systems in order to facilitate seamless management of your cash flow. Users can monitor cash across various accounts, automate bank reconciliations and initiate transactions directly from within IFS.
Muzulu offers a plugin that connects IFS to banking networks via our technology partner AccessPay. With this plugin, bank statements automatically appear in your IFS reconciliation screen, providing an up-to-the-minute view of your financial position across your entire enterprise and allowing you to generate transactions from within IFS Cloud.
AccessPay automates business payments directly from IFS across any payment type, including Bacs, Swift, SEPA and Faster Payments. This saves you time and effort while increasing accuracy, and can be built into your IFS ERP with Muzulu’s simple and intuitive integration.
Control expenses and manage inventory
With IFS Cloud solutions delivered by Muzulu, businesses can benefit from a wide variety of features enabling them to track and control expenses in a user-friendly, hassle-free way. For example, IFS allows you to set budgets for different expense categories and monitor your spending against these budgets – which helps you keep your spending firmly under control.
IFS Cloud’s inventory management functions also enable you to keep a watchful eye over your inventory levels, ensuring that you have sufficient supplies as and when you need them. Maintaining optimal inventory levels in this way can help to improve your cash flow, avoiding tying up cash unnecessarily, as well as enhancing the overall efficiency of your business.
Negotiate better payment terms
By providing construction businesses with a detailed real-time overview of their finances and enabling them to get better control over their cash flow, IFS Cloud provides them with insights they can use when negotiating payment terms with suppliers.
This can help them to negotiate more favourable terms and therefore boost their cash flow. Negotiating shorter terms with customers, furthermore, can also help construction firms improve their cash inflows.
At Muzulu, we specialise in helping businesses – including those in the construction industry – to flourish and grow by delivering industry-leading IFS consultancy. Contact us today to find out more about what our IFS Cloud solutions can do for you.
